Posted by John Ager on 24 July 2015.

Each July, there is an influx of thousands of interns, residents and other health care providers at our nations’ teaching hospitals and other health care facilities. These new faces are often inexperienced and unfamiliar with their new surroundings, but they are nonetheless responsible for executing patient care.  Some researchers have suggested that incidents of medical malpractice increase during this time.  It’s called the July Effect and, intuitively at least, it makes sense that more medical errors would occur during this time.

Here is what some folks think it looks like.

Whether the July Effect it is real or not has been the subject of some debate.  A study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine in 2011 tried to get to the bottom the matter by reviewing, analyzing and synthesizing the finding of 39 studies published on the issue since 1989.  You can read it here.  The research demonstrated that high quality studies often detected a July Effect, while lower quality studies did not, essentially confirming its existence.  Limitations of the Annals study, however, prevented the authors from reaching any conclusions about the degree of risk the July Effect poses in any of the variety of settings it was observed.

So, what does this mean for patients?  I have had many cases involving the conduct of interns and residents whose inexperience resulted in poor treatment or a failing to recognize situations that required more experienced care givers, but I have not perceived a July Effect.  Getting medical care is dangerous because physicians and health care providers make errors all year long.   The reality is that we all have to learn what we do somehow and more mistakes are likely to be made by novices than those who are more experienced in any profession.  I believe that our current system of training those who provide medical care works pretty well.  While there is always room for improvement, we simply have to accept that to get any care at all, the mistakes that go along with learning to provide it is a cost we must bear.